minimalist shopaholic

We move a lot. I can’t use a past tense in that sentence, because every time we move, we say to ourselves that this would be for good when in fact, all of our apartments lasted less than two years. Whether it is voluntary or involuntary, moving is always such a rush — and thank god if it doesn’t turn into full-blown mayhem. I came to accept the fact that you can’t  not  rush when you move — how can you? You don’t want to pay two rents, it’s twice as expensive to hire movers across two days instead of getting everything out (or in) in one day, and no one loves the sight of brown boxes stacked up to the ceiling. So instead of taking the time to make sure we do everything right, we optimize for efficiency. We don’t think through what is the best way to pack things up, nor do we waste time marking boxes ‘bedroom’ and ‘living room’ because at the end of the day everything gets mixed up. Our trick is to get a lot of oversized boxes and just throw things in like robots...

It was a hot day in New York. We’ve been in a pseudo nomad state of living for three weeks, jumping from a fancy boutique hotel in Williamsburg to a three-star hotel in Downtown Brooklyn, and finally moved to a one bedroom Airbnb in Park Slope. We just wrapped up our convenient but slightly uninspiring suburban life in California and moved to New York City. My husband transferred to his New York office, and I left my job at a tech company. We waited for our stuff to arrive for a month instead of two weeks. We had sent our daughter, Lola (3YO) to Italy to spend the summer with nonna — a unique blend of a fairy godmother and top chef, widely known as an ‘Italian grandmother’ — so that she didn’t have to tag along in the frustrating journey of cross-continental moving. If it weren’t for this precaution, those four weeks would have been significantly more challenging. Instead, I practically considered it as an extended vacation — sort of like, ‘me time, all the time’. I was going to wor...